When someone is incarcerated for the first time, the ripples are felt far beyond a defendant and victim. The inmate’s families are thrown into a world of restrictions, visitation time slots, strained relationships and in many cases, their family member’s change of psyche as they’re learning to adjust to prison life.

It can be isolating in its unfamiliarity.

Rick Dye has long been involved with the incarcerated community, having served as the executive director for the Re-Entry Alliance Pensacola, Inc. to combat transitional issues like substance abuse and homelessness. He is now working to start a support group for families and friends struggling to maintain relationships with their incarcerated loved ones.

“Family members go through a lot of emotional pain, social pain, shame and other emotions that are often new to them,” he said. “We’re trying to bring together people in the community who find themselves in that situation to offer up emotional support and factual information.”

Dye said one of the most common gripes he’s heard from family members is the lack of information disseminated about logistics like how to establish a telephone account to receive calls from a loved one, how to know which vendors are serving the prison their loved one is in or what’s required to attend visitation.

“Besides going through all of this emotional experience, you get to come down to practical things you need to do to maintain contact and relationship with your incarcerated loved one or friend,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of men and women who are incarcerated come home and it’s important they maintain that family connection while incarcerated.”

When Chad, the son of Escambia County mom Rita Mattson, was sentenced in 2010 to 15 years in prison for a DUI manslaughter charge, he was first located four hours away in Jasper. The family would travel on weekends, staying in a motel, which was a draining six months before he was moved closer to home to Blackwater River Correctional Institution, and eventually Santa Rosa Correctional Institution where he is now.

“I had nobody, we hadn’t ever deal with prisons or prisoners, that wasn’t our family or anything we’d ever been exposed to,” Mattson said. “It’s very easy for a new person to really get wrapped up in some of the things you’re told because you’re basically at the mercy of someone telling you what to do and what’s going on and sometimes you learn the hard way.”

Mattson, her husband and Chad’s fiancée, Tara Blackwell, visit every other weekend and work hard to maintain the relationship while Chad’s incarcerated. He has four more years to serve, but will eventually come home and the family wants that transition to be as seamless as possible.

“Chad’s obviously very important to all of us, but I don’t think there’s many families that have the same resources and it’s important to hear from people from all backgrounds so you know what options there are,” Blackwell said of the importance of starting a support group. “I think it’s human nature that we all trust the system’s going to do its job, but what we have to realize is we have to dig deeper sometimes and figure out what’s truly going to be best.”

Dye said he’s currently collecting names and contact information for potential support group members, and from there he hopes to schedule the first meeting in the next two months.

He said the hope is to bring in guest speakers and experts, as well as to allow for group members to ask their own questions and hear other members' experiences.

“One of the purposes of the group is to have people with special knowledge in psychology or addiction or motivation or just information about the system to come and talk, be able to answer questions and just equip these family members and friends with accurate information they can pass on and act on,” Dye said. “Getting upset about misinformation is not helpful and encouragement needs to be not only for the inmate but for the inmate’s family.”

Any family members or friends of inmates who want to join the group should contact Dye at 850-832-3014.